Building a Marketing Foundation: The Importance of the 'Plan Phase'

When it comes to marketing, jumping straight into execution without a solid foundation is like trying to build a skyscraper on shifting sand. Too often, businesses focus on tactics—blog posts, emails, ads—without ensuring they have the right structure in place. That’s where the ‘Plan Phase’ comes in. It’s the foundational stage that sets everything up for success, ensuring your marketing efforts aren’t built on messy data, disjointed systems, or unclear customer insights.

What Is the ‘Plan Phase’?

The ‘Plan Phase’ is all about getting everything mise en place—a term chefs use to describe organizing all their ingredients before cooking. For marketing, this means making sure your data, systems, and strategy are in order before layering on inbound tactics. It’s the difference between a well-oiled machine and a chaotic mess.

Key activities in the ‘Plan Phase’ include:

• HubSpot Audit – Ensuring your HubSpot setup is optimized and free of redundancies or inefficiencies.
• Web Design Audit & Updates – Reviewing user experience, site structure, and conversion paths to make necessary improvements.
• Crafting or Updating Personas – Clearly defining your ideal customers so your messaging resonates with them.
• Designing the Customer Journey – Mapping how customers interact with your business, from first touch to loyal evangelist.
• Content Audit – Assessing existing content for gaps, opportunities, and alignment with customer needs.
• Building the Sales CRM – Structuring your CRM to work seamlessly with your marketing efforts.
• Auditing Web Copy – Ensuring messaging is clear, consistent, and conversion-focused.
• Cleaning Up and Auditing Contacts & Companies – Removing duplicates, fixing inaccuracies, and creating a structured database.

Why This Matters

Without a solid ‘Plan Phase,’ businesses run into major headaches down the line:

• Messy data leads to wasted time and poor decision-making.
• Unstructured customer journeys result in lost leads and inconsistent messaging.
• A poorly optimized CRM makes it harder for sales and marketing to align.
• Website and content gaps hurt conversions and engagement.

By taking the time to clean up, structure, and optimize before launching into marketing tactics, you avoid unnecessary backtracking and ensure that your strategies actually work.

What Comes Next? The ‘Path Phase’ and ‘Peak Phase’

Once your foundation is set, you can move into the ‘Path Phase,’ which involves executing inbound marketing best practices: content marketing, email automation, lead nurturing, and more. From there, the ‘Peak Phase’ introduces advanced strategies to refine and scale your efforts. Learn more about those inbound marketing strategies and tactics here.

Get Your Marketing House in Order

If you’re looking to improve your marketing but feel like something isn’t quite clicking, the issue might not be your tactics—it might be the foundation they’re built on. Taking the time to audit, clean, and structure your systems ensures that every marketing effort moving forward is more effective and less of a headache.

Need help getting your marketing house in order? Let’s start with the ‘Plan Phase.’

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash